Friday, November 25, 2016

Watched the game again

Well, our guards won't always play that poorly. By the way, clarification from my last post. Jordan Harris did not dribble the ball off his foot. Diatta gave him a bounce pass at his feet.

All the same, to go into their home state and knock off a top-five team, we really needed clutch play from our perimeter guys. We didn't get it. Our guards shot 6 for 31 from the field, 16 percent from behind the arc, and had 9 turnovers against 5 assists.

Another scoring option off the bench sure would have been great to have.

That's one of the reasons why I felt we should have brought in Tookie Brown, the point guard from the Athens area, in 2015. Sure, he's a sub-six-footer, and we already had J.J. Frazier. However, when Mississippi State fired Rick Ray and Tookie Brown re-opened his recruitment, I thought sure Fox was going to jump on him right away. Brown led his team to the state championship, was a 3,000 point scorer, and was available again. However, Brown's major suitors at the time were Tennessee and Georgia State.

Brown ended up at Georgia Southern, where he has shown that he can create and score the basketball. Although he didn't have his best shooting day, this week he put up 26 points, 10 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 steals, with 0 turnovers against Dennis Smith and the rest of the vaunted N.C. State backcourt.

Likewise, for the 2016 class, I wanted us to go hard after Athens area player, Kamar Baldwin. Happy with Crump, especially if getting him brought us Jordan Harris, too. However, if we passed on Baldwin, shame on us.

Butler is very happy with Baldwin. Besides being an elite defender, Baldwin is shooting 65 percent from the floor on the year, and 55 percent from three. Against Vanderbilt, he was 5 of 7 from the floor, and 2 of 3 from behind the arc. Production like that would have won us the game against Kansas.

Hope we can pick up another guard in this recruiting class. In the meantime, let's go out and beat Gardner Webb.